Howard
Richler is a Montreal-area word nerd and author of these seven
books on a variety of language themes: Dead Sea Scroll Palindromes,
Take My Words, A Bawdy Language, Global Mother Tongue, Can I
Have a Word With You?, Strange Bedfellows and his most
recent bookWordplay:
Arranged and Deranged Wit( May 2016, Ronsdale
Press, Vancouver).

These
are but three of the countless headlines that inundated us days
after the American election asserting that left-wing “elites”
were responsible for the election of Donald Trump. But hold
on folks. Surely billionaire Donald Trump who was born into
a mega-rich family is also an elite? And of course, notwithstanding
that Trump’s wealth is far greater and far less transparent
than that of the Clintons, this didn’t prevent him from
constantly assailing Hillary Clinton as an elite on social media.

After
the Brexit vote, Trump declared that his support of it showed
that he was “on the right side of the issue . . . with
the people” whereas “Hillary, as always stood with
the elites.” Trump’s Chief Strategist Steven Bannon,
and former chief guru of the euphemistically-dubbed alt-right,
once complained that “elites have taken all the upside
for themselves and pushed the downside to the working and middle
class Americans.” Incidentally, man-of-the people Bannon
received an MBA from Harvard and then plied his knowledge as
an investment banker at Goldman Sachs. In case, you’ve
forgotten, Trump consistently denounced Goldman Sachs during
the presidential campaign for its ties to Hillary Clinton.

Similarly,
in the United Kingdom, proponents of Brexit railed against the
bevy of liberal elites in a variety of disciplines such as economics
and journalism who warned about the consequences of abandoning
European integration. It is, however, somewhat rich that the
two main faces for Brexit, Boris Johnson and former Secretary
of State for Justice Michael Gove were former presidents of
Oxford’s leading debating society, the less-than proletarian
Oxford Union. Prime Minister Theresa May had the chutzpah in
October to claim that the “liberal elite” was sneering
at voters who voted for Brexit, notwithstanding that just weeks
before the June Brexit referendum she warned group of investment
bankers that the UK’s leaving the EU could lead to economic
disaster.

However,
Canadians shouldn’t be smug and imagine that the same
selective elite-bashing hasn’t occurred in Canada. In
November, Conservative candidate Kellie Leitch sent an email
that congratulated Donald Trump on his election victory, praised
his anti-establishment message and declared “the elites
are out of touch.” Leitch and her advisors have made “elite”
the buzzword of her campaign bid. They have criticized Lisa
Raitt for supporting “the left-wing media elite”
and called Andrew Scheer an “out-of-touch elite”
for launching his leadership campaign at the National Press
Theatre in Ottawa. Incidentally, MD Leitch, who grew up in an
affluent family in Winnipeg made these comments while promoting
a $500-a-person fundraiser organized by lawyers.

Similarly,
one of the mantras of former Conservative Canadian Prime Minister
Stephen Harper was that he governed according to the views of
“ordinary Canadians” rather than on “elite
opinions.” Invariably, these “elite opinions”
referred to any proposal emanating from anyone to the left of
him on the political spectrum.

This
disparagement does not extend to the use of elite as an adjective.
An elite quarterback, elite troops or Elite Chocolate merely
designates excellence. So, how did ‘elite’ when
used as a noun take on this nasty connotation referencing people
on the left of the political spectrum?

Dictionaries
are not of much help in explaining how elite has acquired a
tainted sense when used as a noun. The first OED definition
of elite is as the “choice part or flower (of society,
or of any body or class of person” and has its first citation
for this definition in the 19th century. Actually, it does show
an earlier meaning in the 15th century but with a very narrow
sense as “a person chosen, spec., a bishop elect.”

The
Encarta World English Dictionary and the American Heritage
Dictionary get closer to the implied sense in the headlines
quoted above. The former defines “elite” as “a
small group of people, within a larger group who have more power,
social standing, wealth, or talent than the rest of the group
” and the latter as “a group or class of persons
considered to be superior to others because of their intelligence,
social standing or wealth.”

But
even these definitions don’t explain why the term is used
nowadays almost exclusively to refer to the liberal left. If
the classic connotation is of people by virtue of birth being
able to achieve status at the expense of others, surely the
word applies more to the Trumps and Leitches of the cosmos.

In
1956, in The Power Elite, sociologist C. Wright Mills
defined elites as “those who have the most of what there
is to have, which is generally held to include money, power
and prestige, as well as the ways of life to which they lead.”
However, Mills’ generalized definition of elites didn’t
come to dominate in mainstream politics. In 1951, in God
and Man at Yale, patrician William F, Buckley Jr. excoriated
the socialistic and atheistic elites who dominated academia
in the liberal arts at Ivy League institutions. In fact, the
1952 presidential election between Republican candidate Dwight
Eisenhower and Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson was cast
by Republicans as a choice between “regular” American,
war hero Eisenhower and “egghead” liberal Stevenson,
and the regular guy trounced the egghead in the election.

Starting
in the 1950s, a process developed whereby the term elite was
increasingly used to refer to politically left-leaning people,
whose education was viewed as opening the doors to affluence
and power and to thus to dominating managerial positions. I
checked the site Google
Ngram Viewer which charts the frequency of words
and expressions from the years 1500 to 2008, and discovered
that the expressions “liberal elites,” “political
elites” and “Democratic elites” enjoyed huge
spikes in usage starting in the 1960s. I suppose, the underlying
premise of those who employ these terms is the belief that many
left-leaning people who claim to support the rights of working
men and women are themselves members of the ruling class and
are therefore out of touch with the real needs of the people
they claim to support and protect. An example of the contempt
toward liberals is expressed in this advice from a political
advertisement from the right-wing Club for Growth towards Howard
Dean who was running to be the Democrat candidate for president
in 2004: “Take your tax-hiking, government-spending, latte-drinking,
sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing,
Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont where
it belongs.” Who knew lattes were so deliciously seditious?

So
it is clear that by the turn of the century, right-wing talking
heads were able to change the focus of the term elite away from
one of class to one of culture. It’s possible that many
people supported Trump because they were put off by what they
saw as the smugness of some people in the Democratic Party and
by the left-leaning media. Exemplifying this was political commentator
Bill Maher’s suggestion that people who intended to vote
for Trump suffered from congenital defects. Similarly, Hillary
Clinton’s comment during the campaign that half of Trump
supporters were “deplorables” caused her great political
harm.

Claiming
that you are somehow superior to others in any aspect of your
life is a no-no in our post-modern, post-truth world. Therefore,
right-wing propagandists use the designation “elite”
as a polemical tool to declaim positions associated with the
left as varied as environmentalism, secularism, feminism, sexuality,
immigration, and multiculturalism.

Ironically,
because “regular” Americans were angry at the elites
represented by the Democratic Party and the media, they nevertheless
elected one of the richest and most elitist people in the United
States. And the worth of those he has selected in his cabinet
is staggering. CBS News calculated that the net worth of seven
members of Trump’s cabinet exceeds eleven billion. And
“ordinary Americans” disdained the Democrat Party
notwithstanding the fact that Democratic President Barack Obama
had among other advantages brought them the Affordable Care
Act, a form of health care previously only afforded to the elites,
that became available to over 20 million hard-up Americans.

Only
time will tell if “elite” to refer to so-called
ivory tower groups with certain political leanings is more appropriate
than “elite” used to designate the resident of the
Fifth Avenue, pseudo-Versailles Trump Tower. Stay tuned.